Hi, I am a 29 year old hoh girl from Cali I have been reading here for several months and keep wanting to reply to threads, so I figured I would introduce myself. I was born with bilateral sensorineural loss-moderate-severe in my right ear and severe in my left. Wore HAs for the first 9 years of my life before giving them up to pass as hearing...yeah that was a frustrating twenty years. I was mainstreamed in school and excelled, though I rarely knew what anyone was saying in the classroom. I just received a new pair of hearing aids-in blue of course-last month. It is the same love-hate relationship that I remember from twenty years ago. I love them for having conversations with friends and that is about it. I do like that my TV volume is cut in half, but I still need captions to understand what is being said. The HA's also make music cut in and out, and the audiologist said she cannot fix that. For everything else, I hate the darn things. Everything is too loud and causes overload. I do have both an auditory and a sensory processing disorder, which is probably why I cannot stand to wear them when walking around. I can sometimes stand to have them on in stores and on the bus, but not always. At least I can turn them off when life gets too loud. So now, I kind of feel like I do not fit into either world. I have taken a semester of ASL, but that is a far cry from belonging to the Deaf world. But without my HA's, I am feeling more and more like a deaf person rather than a hoh person, like I do not fit in the hearing world either...ah this intro is a bit long, if you have made it this far.